Left to right: Fiona McAnena of Sex Matters, Sorcha nic Lochlainn of The Countess, Danielle Loughrey of Gaels For Fair Play, Marianne Driessen of Athena Forum and Nora Calder of WRN NI. At the podium is journalist Catherine McGinty, who moderated the event

I spent last Thursday writing a response piece to Allison Morris’s ignorant and nasty op-ed in the Belfast Telegraph. I had been told that if I filed 600 words, the paper would “consider” publishing it, and though I thought this was an insulting response from an outlet to a woman who had been traduced by one of their columnists as outrageously as I had been on BBC Radio Ulster Talkback, I decided to do it because the women of Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland had asked me to.

When I filed it close of play Thursday, I got a short response from the paper’s editor, Martin Breen:

I’m on leave after tomorrow for the next two weeks, so our Head of Content may be in touch with you regarding this. The current plan is to publish something on either Saturday or Monday, subject to final scheduling.

Having had an initial look, I can’t see any significant issues with the majority of the piece. The only point I would suggest revisiting is the references to the BBC radio programme, as I mentioned previously. Our readers will be familiar with Allison’s column, but not necessarily with a radio debate that did not appear on any of our platforms.

As with all opinion pieces, the article will go through our usual editorial process, including legal, style and other editorial checks. Once those edits have been made, we will send the revised version back to you for approval. Nothing will be published until you have had the opportunity to review it.

And then for days I heard nothing, despite several further emails as well as phone calls on my behalf by WRN NI.

On Monday, together with my colleague Maya Forstater, I arrived in Belfast. We hadn’t expected to attend — in fact I was meant to be on vacation — but once the event was cancelled we felt it was important to show support.

Finally, on Tuesday afternoon — too late for the piece to make any sense, since the popup event organised to replace the cancelled panel had been and gone — I finally hear back from Adrian Rutherford, the paper’s head of content (I’ve omitted a section that related solely to WRN NI):

Apologies that I am only replying now. Some staff members were unexpectedly absent yesterday who I needed to speak to re this.

We had committed to running a response from WRN and we are offering to run the piece that […] sent us, in an edited form which has been copied below.

We are very happy to publish robust and strongly argued views on this subject, including views which challenge arguments made by our journalists. However, we don’t think the second piece offered by Helen works for us editorially because it is primarily focused on challenging Allison Morris’s credibility and the quality of her journalism, rather than advancing the wider debate on the substantive issues.

There is also a significant amount of material already in the public domain making that case, including Helen’s own piece published online following the BBC Radio Ulster discussion. In that article, you describe Allison as having engaged in “terrible journalism” and say you intend to provide an “unvarnished assessment” of her work. That makes the proposed Belfast Telegraph piece feel more like an extension of an existing dispute than a fresh contribution to our opinion pages.

We also would not ordinarily feature or reproduce a debate or exchange which took place on another broadcaster’s platform, particularly where it did not involve the Belfast Telegraph or originate on any of our platforms. The fact that the BBC discussion took place therefore does not, in itself, give us a reason to publish a piece principally revisiting that exchange.

…

Helen, re your comment proposal, while we are not running this offering, it is not to say we would not consider opinion pieces from you in future. As always, we would be happy to consider submissions addressing relevant issues and debates in this broader area, provided they offer a distinct contribution to the discussion and are suitable for our opinion pages.

I’m hardly surprised at the cowardice and lack of integrity on display in this reply: this is an outlet that published Morris’s column, after all. But I did the work of writing the piece (and 600 words takes hours longer than 1,000, so I feel pretty cross).

So here it is, as filed.

On July 27th Allison Morris wrote about Féile an Phobail cancelling a panel organised by Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland because it “campaigns against rights for the Transgender community”. Morris slurred the grassroots group as “aligned with right wing, misogynist political agitators”, and falsely claimed they were “heavily funded”. Fiona McAnena, my colleague at human rights charity Sex Matters, was among the speakers.

On July 28th, when Morris and I appeared on BBC Radio Talkback, Morris doubled down. She claimed JK Rowling funded WRN’s legal action against Féile, that “you couldn’t get a sheet of paper” between me and WRN and the “far right”, and that our supporters were “the same people that were cheering on attacks on migrants”.

In fact, WRN NI self-funded its legal action. It subsists on tiny donations and volunteers’ time, while Féile receives £800,000 annually from the taxpayer. As for our “far right” position, it’s simply that humans come in two sexes, and acknowledging this matters for women’s rights.

This position is held by almost everyone: both sexes, all ages, all politics, every faith and none. Polling last year found that 72% of Northern Irish voters supported the UK Supreme Court ruling that trans identification doesn’t change a person’s legal sex, including majorities of Unionist and Sinn Fein voters.

And anyone can play guilt by association. I could point out that Morris’s position on this issue is shared by those waving banners at London Trans+ Pride on July 25th calling for Rowling to be murdered and women like me to be gassed. It’s shared by the trans-identifying man convicted in 2024 for telling me that he would love to rip my eyes out, chop my hands off and carve my face up. But I wouldn’t stoop so low.

Morris observes that most violence against women is in the home. But that’s because the home is where bad men have easiest access to women, and women are least able to escape. Thinking this means it’s safe to let men into women-only public spaces is as silly as saying that because most traffic accidents involving pedestrians happen on local and regional roads, we can all go for strolls on motorways.

Of course keeping trans-identifying men out of women’s spaces won’t stop all violence against women. But it will stop some, and I think that’s worth it. This is the position Morris misrepresents, in a parody unworthy of a serious journalist, as women like me claiming that public toilets are “the most dangerous place on earth for women, with trans predators lurking in every cubicle”.

On Talkback, Morris insisted my position requires believing that “all trans women are deviants and sex offenders”. No: just that they are men, that some men harm women and that if you make it easier for men to enter spaces where women are vulnerable, some of those who take advantage will indeed be “deviants and sex offenders”.

As Morris herself said, sex offenders are “the most devious people on earth”, befriending single mothers online and becoming priests and football coaches to gain access to victims. Why she can’t see that some will claim to be women for the same reason is a mystery to me.

I know of hundreds of cases where men who claim to be women have entered women-only spaces, from toilets and changing rooms to mental health support groups and prisons, and harmed women by exposing themselves, watching those women undress and in the worst cases, assaulting and raping women.

Morris writes that she is “baffled” by our position. I suggest she takes the time-honoured journalistic approach of sitting down with WRN NI, asking good-faith questions and listening to the answers.

Helen Joyce is a former staff journalist at The Economist, where she held many posts including Brazil correspondent, Finance editor and Britain editor. She is the author of the best-selling “Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights” and now works for the human-rights charity Sex Matters.

No trip to Belfast is complete without a picture at the Peace Wall.

I’m so sorry updates have been infrequent recently. The news remains relentless, and I simply haven’t found the time. But today I am sitting down to write an op-ed for consideration by the Belfast Telegraph, in response to a column it published last week by a journalist I had not previously heard of, Allison Morris, who reports on crime in Northern Ireland. I don’t know whether it will be published, but if it is I will send out a link. And in any case I will write more about it, here and perhaps elsewhere.

In the meantime, here’s an absolutely enraging radio appearance by me and Morris on BBC Radio Ulster on Tuesday 28th. The only other time I have experienced such rage during an interview was when I sat down with Helen Webberley for Times Radio, and at least I could prepare myself for that since I already knew how monstrous she was. I can honestly say it was worse than sitting on the same stage as Freda Wallace, despite his disgusting personal presence, boasts about his fetishes, drunkenness and ripped fishnets. And despite being less than 20 minutes long and my being dialled in rather than in the same room, as I was with Fred.

If you haven’t already listened to the interview and think your blood pressure can survive a whistlestop tour through a selection of the slurs, misrepresentations and idiotic “arguments” for trans inclusion we’ve all spent years debunking, you can listen back here.

Or you can listen to it interspersed with reaction and analysis from YouTuber MJ Murphy. It’s three times longer, but significantly less enraging.

I’ll come back to this topic when I’ve filed for BelTel. Let’s see if they have the integrity to print an accurate statement of the gender-critical position and an unvarnished assessment of Morris’s terrible journalism.

I spent 5th and 6th July in London at one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. The subject was gender medicine, specifically as it pertains to children, and the programme was pulled together by CAN-SG and SEGM. I think that in the coming weeks at least some of the talks will go online, and I highly recommend watching when they do.

A pleasing number of attendees I spoke with during the breaks were newbies – unhappy parents of trans-identifying children, young people who were developing serious worries about the ideology or coming out of trans identification themselves, and medical professionals of all stripes. Just a year or two ago, I don’t think these people would have come across the conference programme online, and even if they had, most wouldn’t have dared attend. I was delighted (and a bit embarrassed) by the number who said that they had first started to ask questions when they saw me in a video or podcast; it’s quite something to know that the messages in bottles that get cast to the waters really do get picked up and read.

One of the most interesting things that happened was at the end of a session in which therapists were speaking about their approach to supporting trans-identifying children. They spoke about their open-ended and supportive approach, asking rather than answering questions and seeking not to make decisions for the child or foreclose any options. All standard fare for therapy, but it provoked an angry and upset question from a member of the audience, gay-rights campaigner Mr Menno. When, he asked, would these children be simply told the truth, rather than all this pandering (I paraphrase)? Why weren’t the therapists telling them, in terms, that they cannot change sex, and that it is stupid and harmful to try?

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Speaking with Edward Tye, president of Durham Union

On June 12th I spoke at the Durham Union, a standalone student society (and charity) like the similarly named but better-known organisations at Oxford and Cambridge. The current president, Edward Tye, had emailed me out of the blue before Christmas inviting me to visit, and I had agreed while warning him that he would come under heavy pressure to cancel the invitation once it became known, that he would probably not be able to find anyone to share a platform with me and that if he did they would probably end up pulling out, probably shortly beforehand with the intention of getting the event cancelled. I asked him not to waste my time and insult me, as several other student societies have, by inviting me and then reneging—or, worse, simply ghosting me, as Cambridge Union did a few years ago.

Edward dealt with the empty-chair problem by deciding to run the event as an “in conversation”, that is, with just him and me on the platform, and lots of time for questions, some pre-submitted and some from the floor. Then nothing happened until two weeks before the event, when Durham Student Union, the university’s Trans Association and QueerSphere (its LGBT association) published a joint statement saying that inviting me was “irresponsible and uncaring”, and asking Durham Union to “account for itself”. As the event approached, the Student Union arranged an alternative event on the night “centring trans voices”, and urged those who came to hear me speak to “ask Helen Joyce the difficult questions she needs to answer about her views”. (Here’s a writeup in the Durham University magazine, The Palatinate.)

Apart from its childish tone, this all strikes me as completely reasonable. Everyone is entitled not to come to an event where I’m speaking: it’s a right almost every human being alive has exercised without exception. Others are entitled to put on events whenever and wherever they like (although I do wish it would occur to them that they might be the baddies, given that I and those considering coming to my event aren’t denouncing them, let alone behaving in such a way that they will have to take elaborate security precautions). As for turning up and asking me difficult questions, I’d be only too pleased. It would make a nice change from the usual emotional blackmail and question-begging.

Then, the week before the event, Edward emailed to ask if we could have a call. It was going ahead, he assured me, but the university had asked for extra security measures, and he wanted to talk them through with me. I was being moved to a different hotel because the one I was booked into was known to be where the society usually puts up guests, and they didn’t want a protest outside. The event was being moved too, but nobody was being told: attendees were to check in at the original location and then be escorted to the new one. Six security guards had been hired. And finally, I was being disinvited from the drinks reception afterwards because otherwise the university would have insisted on bouncers. The cost would have been prohibitive.

We’ve all got so used to this that we forget how surreal it is. I’m not a member of a crime syndicate or the president of a country at war. But of course I was so pleased that it was going ahead that I agreed to all of it (and in any case there was no one to complain to: Edward was the person coping with a degree of fuss totally out of proportion with anything else he had done in his stint as society president, not the person demanding that degree of fuss).

The evening of the event, I found out that behind the scenes things had been a bit nastier. The main duty of incoming presidents of Durham Union, Edward told me, is to put together the events programme, and this job falls to them alone. And back in January, when he presented the programme he had curated to the society’s standing committee—ten students holding positions such as treasurer, secretary and so on, as well as the current president and president-elect—one of them (he didn’t tell me which one) complained that I shouldn’t have been invited because I was “controversial”. A vote was then called, even though the programme was Edward’s decision alone. Everyone else voted against his decision (here is The Palatinate’s writeup, published the evening of my event).

When Edward told me about this, he was still a bit stunned by it, as people always tend to be after their first brush with trans exceptionalism. I can’t remember whom I first heard saying it, but I’ve said it many times since then myself: “Nobody expects the Tranish Inquisition.” (Here’s the reference, if you weren’t brought up on British comedy. I’m not sure it’s all that funny if you didn’t see it when it first aired, more than 50 years ago).

I thought it was pretty brave of Edward to ignore the vote, even though it was an empty gesture. Much silencing and cancellation is like this—shaming and moral grandstanding rather than actually threatening or firing. But humans are tribal creatures, and shaming feels pretty awful. I think most people would have withdrawn my invitation at this point, and it’s to his credit that that didn’t seem to have occurred to him.

Well, the event went off smoothly—of course I can’t know whether, if there had been no special security, things would have been different. It was a relatively small audience, perhaps 50 people, probably because some would-be attendees worried about being seen to attend but also because lectures have finished for the year and quite a lot of students are no longer around. The society had solicited questions beforehand, which could be submitted anonymously. About half (discounting a few trollish ones) were apparently denunciations of my transphobia; most of the rest were from people saying they agreed with me but didn’t dare to say so publicly.

The evening kicked off with a statement from Durham Student Union’s welfare officer, who stood up, introduced herself and said she was available to talk or provide support if anyone felt the need. (I didn’t see anyone take her up on that afterwards.) Edward asked me to explain how I had got interested in the subject, and proceeded swiftly to taking questions from the floor.

Almost all of them were sincere, though several were revealing of widespread misinformation—lots about intersex, for example. (No clownfish or “your toilet at home”, thankfully.) The smartest question of the evening was in response to my talking about how young women believe this stuff because they’ve been indoctrinated into it: indoctrinated by whom, a young man asked. Mainly by other women, I answered (I have written previously about this, see below).

Someone else asked whether I thought trans ideology’s sheer illogicality and obvious falsehood, plus the harm to women’s rights, meant that it would inevitably fail. Far from it, I said: stupid and nasty belief systems, in particular about women, can persist—just look at Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. I think America will probably eventually stop sterilising children, but I think it’s quite possible blue states will settle on a sort of “men’s right to roam”, meaning that women lose all rights to any space or service where men don’t have the right to enter. That, the questioner said, was not what he expected or wanted to hear.

Most of those in the room were men, and nearly every question came from a man. One exception was the welfare officer, who read out a question about why I wouldn’t acknowledge that many, many people had hugely benefited from transitioning, as she knew personally (I said plenty of people would tell you they had been hugely benefited by becoming born again, but that doesn’t mean their beliefs are true or that they have any right to expect the rest of us to play along). Another student officer, perhaps diversity and inclusion, came up after the event and asked repeatedly and belligerently why I couldn’t see that my insistence on policing single-sex spaces on the basis of appearance would mean great problems for “gender non-conforming women”. Apart from these two, only one other woman asked a question: whether I agreed that trans ideology made much greater demands of women than of men (hell yeah).

Debating societies generally skew male—men seem to find an evening spent in abstract argument more fun than women do (I find it tedious myself, and never went to any such event when I was a student). But events on sex and gender tend to buck that trend. I think this event was open only to members of the debating society, which explains part of the gender gap. But there were women in the room, and most of them stayed silent. Mystery solved afterwards, when two of them came up to me to say they were “huge radfems” who completely agreed with me but didn’t dare let that be known in their friendship groups because they didn’t fancy being ostracised by everyone they knew.

The cost of speaking up on this issue is so much greater for women, especially young women. Among the reasons are greater social policing of views in women’s friendship groups than men’s, the societal expectation that women are “kind” and exist mainly to serve others, especially men, as Victoria Smith so ably describes in her book “Unkind”. But the big thing, I think, is simply that talking accurately about sex has been made taboo. Taboos can attach to anything—I’m old enough to have been brought up to believe that referring to a woman as “she” in her presence was horrifically rude. (“Who’s ‘she’? The cat’s mother?” was the inexplicable phrase used to tell off a child who did this.)

Taboos are sustained by discomfort and shame: you’re made feel like a bad person, or at least low-class, for breaking them. But a taboo can’t survive once enough people push through the discomfort. As I was bundled into my taxi and off to my hotel (while everyone else went to a drinks reception, presumably to discuss what I had said, hmph), I felt pretty positive that if we keep going we’ll witness a “preference cascade”—one of those exciting tipping-point moments when the social cost of honesty falls enough that people start saying what they truly think, at first in a trickle and then in a flood.

PS: I’m told the video will be uploaded to YouTube in due course—I’ll share it when that happens.

I’ve been doing some freelance work unrelated to the Gender Wars, and slightly randomly it’s involved my learning more about the phenomenon known as burnout. It inspired some reflections about my former life as a foreign correspondent, and — since everything is about gender, in the end — about how burnout plays out in this fight and how combatants can protect themselves.

The first thing I found out is that I had a lot of misconceptions about burnout. I had thought it simply meant you had worked so hard and so unhealthily you collapsed — which is sort-of true, in that overwork and unhealthy working habits are a major part of it, but also not true because there are plenty of types of overwork and unhealthy working habits that don’t put you at risk of burnout, for all that they still cause severe physical and mental harm. Conversely, your workload may not be anything out of the ordinary, objectively speaking, but you can still be at risk of burnout.

The term was formally defined seven years ago by the World Health Organisation as “an occupational syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”. It has three elements: emotional exhaustion, impaired performance and what is sometimes called “depersonalisation” — a sense of distance, unreality, detachment and cynicism. A fourth element, feelings of guilt and self-blame, is so standard that some argue it should also be included in the definition.

This conceptualises burnout as solely about work. That was intentional: the WHO wanted employers to be responsible for prevention and mitigation. But the same phenomenon can happen in other situations, for example if someone is under extreme, unrelenting pressure as an unpaid carer. So I’m going to ignore the workplace part of the definition: I don’t approve of altering the definition of a phenomenon in this instrumental way.

In brief, the path to burnout starts with something that at first glance seems counterintuitive: a honeymoon phase. During this period people feel full of energy. They’re creative and enthusiastic and throw themselves into their work.

That’s great, of course, and plenty of people are like this without being on course to burn out. The issue is when people don’t pace themselves, establish healthy patterns of working or protect their downtime. Work bleeds into everything and boundaries become blurred.

When people become too tired to keep going at this extreme pitch, their performance and enthusiasm start to fade. Then they have to try harder for the same outcome. They may start to eat or drink too much, and exercise and sleep too little, in an attempt not to fall behind. They’re now really overworking because their effectiveness has diminished.

Unless they course-correct, this may progress to feeling constantly stressed, further deterioration in performance and outbursts of crying or rage. Even at this point, a sufferer typically doesn’t realise what is happening: the path to burnout is characterised by denial. Often, it’s obvious to other people what is happening long before it is to the sufferer.

The final phases of burnout are characterised by chronic energy depletion and seriously impaired work performance. People start to feel apathetic and detached. Eventually working becomes impossible. By this point sufferers are likely to be clinically depressed and to have to stop working entirely. Recovery may require expert help.

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I first met Maeve Halligan just over a year ago, at the Oxford Literary Festival, where I was being interviewed by Julie Bindel. Maeve asked an excellent question from the floor, about what young women like her could do at university when not only their fellow students but their lecturers were all on board with gender woo, and dissenting from it in class or assignments, or even being known to question it, would mean social death, disciplinary issues and quite possibly a worse degree classification.

From memory I said I thought young people needed to be cautious. It is easy to say that everyone just needs to be braver, but with things as they are a lot of people can be as brave as they want and all that will change is that they will have their lives destroyed and become yet more object lessons that can be used to terrify everyone else into compliance. I suggested that students might need to stay quiet until they had graduated, but that then they should write to their lecturers, heads of department and university vice-chancellors, telling the adults who were supposed to be opening their minds and teaching them how to think just how badly independent-minded young people are being let down by universities and that those adults are disgraces to the ideals of academia.

I don’t know if Maeve, or anyone else listening, did anything like this. But fortunately she and two other young women in the audience I didn’t know at the time ignored my suggestion that they keep their heads down.

I talked to one of them, Serena Worley, afterwards in the excellently named Turf Tavern, where she told me her TERF origin story — heading off to university in Oregon as a fully signed-up member of the trans cult who had agreed to share a room with a “trans woman”; realising over several horrible months that this person was just a man, and a disturbing one at that; being shunned when she spoke the truth as she saw it and sought support; dropping out, moving back home and then finally moving to the UK to restart her education.

I don’t remember the details of my conversation with Thea Sewell that day. But she has told me since that she came to the event because she had started to have doubts about gender ideology and wanted to hear what Julie and I had to say. She then bought our books, and Kathleen Stock’s too — and a little while later they were seen in her room at Christ’s College Cambridge and she was sent to Coventry by the entire student body, including all her friends.

Some months later, in October 2025, the three of them founded the Cambridge University Society of Women as the only Cambridge student society that restricts membership to actual women — unlike, for example, Women in Business, Women in Law, the Society for Women in the Arts and all of the self-described “feminist” societies in various colleges. Despite the university’s student union taking several months to register the new society and eventually doing so only begrudgingly (women talking together without any men present “contradicts” its ethos, apparently), CUSW has gone from strength to strength, growing in membership and inviting a series of stellar speakers to talk about issues of specific interest to women.

You can find out more about these three brilliant young women and the society in this interview by my colleague Nicole Jones for the Sex Matters podcast.

Sex Matters News

Cambridge University Society of Women

In this week’s episode of our podcast, Sex Matters’ Nicole Jones speaks to Maeve Halligan, Thea Sewell and Serena Worley, co-founders of the Cambridge University Society of Women (CUSW…

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5 months ago · 116 likes · 17 comments · Nicole Jones

It’s also worth reading this interview with Maeve in the Tab, a student magazine. My favourite bit is her excellent riposte to the ridiculous “what about intersex?” question: “Cambridge University has 24,912 students for the academic year 2024-25. To put this into perspective for you, 0.018 per cent of this number [the share of the general population that has the sort of DSD that used to be described as ‘intersex’] is about five people. If anyone with a DSD at Cambridge wants to join the society, they are more than free to come and speak to me about it at any time. Having a DSD does not mean that you are somehow ‘sexless’.”

With Julie at OLF. Photo by Milli Hill

For Julie and me the OLF event was sweet vindication after years of being ignored by literary festivals (Julie also spoke the same day about her book “Feminism for Women”). But I’m sure she’d agree that the most important thing we did that day was provide the pretext for those young women to meet — not just each other but other brilliant young people, including Connie Shaw, a young TERF who now works for the Free Speech Union and who was finishing up her degree at Leeds University at the time. Thea walked up to her and said how nice it was to know there were like-minded young people; they are now good friends.

I saw all four of them again on May 14th*, when Maeve was speaking at a Cambridge Union event and her two co-founders and Connie and I were in the audience. Her speech was astonishing, as was her delivery. Serena also spoke from the floor, very powerfully. The whole event was filmed, and if you have the time it’s worth watching.

Buck Angel spoke first and she was pretty impressive. I have mixed feelings about her: she is a pornographer and I have no doubt that the extraordinary degree to which she passes (when dressed) has lured many self-hating young lesbians to transition. But she has also been remarkably brave in speaking honestly about the harms of testosterone to a woman’s body, a topic about which the doctors who prescribe it remain entirely silent.

The other speakers were awful. Andrew Boff is indescribably self-serving and hateful — he literally scoffed out loud when Maeve mentioned Keira Bell. An American chap, Alphonso David, who I’m told played a part in the destruction of the Human Rights Campaign by gender ideology, talked pure gibberish. Sammy McDonald, a former president of the Cambridge Union, is just the sort of self-satisfied, ignorant little twerp who reminds me why I never went to things like this when I was a student at Cambridge. Helen Webberley’s performance was disgusting even by her own standards — she closed by saying everyone on the opposite side of the debate to her had blood dripping down her hands.

If you can’t stomach the whole thing, watch Buck, who opened the debate, from about 10 minutes in; the intervention by Serena at one hour 17 minutes and Maeve herself from an hour 20 minutes in. (Perhaps also the most unintentionally hilarious bit of the evening: an intervention from the floor by a young woman who said she realised she was trans by listening to The Archers, at 37 minutes 40.)

I don’t know if any of this — the friendships, the society, the speaking of truth in such a captured venue and the viral clips from the debate — would have happened if these young women hadn’t met in person at an event where they could be sure everyone else was on-side. Together, they were able to come up with the plan for the society, knowing they wouldn’t be on their own. As Thea said to me a few days ago: “Going to that one event totally changed the course of my life.”

And as a group they can provide mutual comfort and support, which is incredibly important when they live and work in such a hostile environment. Other students routinely leave rooms when they enter, ostentatiously take photographs and videos of them on the street and whisper audibly in college libraries and bars behind their backs. Working from home as I do, and moving almost entirely in spaces where I know others agree with me, I simply cannot imagine enduring it. I know because they’ve told me that they feel they couldn’t do it without each other, but even with each other it takes remarkable courage and grace.

They have become a public example of honesty and bravery to other young people, some of whom have got in touch. There is now a thriving little ecosystem of gender-critical young people who chat online, arrange events and offer each other companionship and support. More great things are sure to come out of that — most recently another genuinely women-only student society, this one focused on sport, set up by one of their buddies, Eloise Schultz at Leicester University.

Transactivists knew what they were doing when they put so much effort into getting gender-critical events pulled by refusing to be “co-platformed” with us, deluging venues with complaints and, on the rare occasions that such tactics failed, staging aggressive and noisy protests outside. When like-minded people meet in person, it gives them courage. This is especially important when the opinion they share is one that their peers have insisted is bigoted and held by almost no one. If I may be allowed to be briefly sentimental, in any final reckoning of the good I have done in my life, unwittingly helping to provide a pretext for these young people to meet will come pretty high up.

I don’t think I’m being particularly self-aggrandising in saying this; all I did was turn up and talk. The person who really stuck her neck out to make the event happen was Sally Dunsmore, the festival director, who came under a lot of pressure to revoke my invitation. She’s a serially brave person, and we’d be in a much better place if there were more like her in the arts. I’m going to drop her a note now and let her know how much good she did that day. I wonder how much more good she’s done that she doesn’t even know about.

*I originally typed June 14th, not May 14th. D’oh.

I don’t know why Rattley wears enormous rubber breasts. I don’t have a window into any man’s soul. But for some men who do this, it’s definitely part of a fetish. To take just one recent example, photographs and videos of Bryon Noem, husband of Kristi, Donald Trump’s former Homeland Security secretary, published by the Daily Mail show him posing and pouting while wearing colossal fake breasts. The article claims that Noem sent around $25,000 to women he interacted with online, expressed a desire to become a “trans bimbo” and told a friend that he wanted “huge, huge ridiculous boobs”. If the photos are genuine and the claims accurate, this is the fetish of “bimbofication” — becoming sexually excited at the idea of being turned into a brainless, exaggeratedly feminine human doll.

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I recently had an exchange that was interesting and somewhat frustrating (on both sides, probably) with someone I have a lot of respect for. He’s someone I chat with now and then about cultural issues and I don’t worry about policing my speech with him because the way we got to know each other was through free-speech activism.

He dropped me a message asking if what he described as the “new wave of extreme trans ideology” and also various other strands of the identitarian left were being “driven by 18-30 white women”. He didn’t mention why he was asking, but it’s an obvious question. Both generally — this is the group that is most likely to support gender self-ID, say it’s going to vote Green and so on — and right now, because a really good article describing the extent of this demographic’s disaffection had just been published in the New Statesman.

That article makes the point, with copious evidence including new polling, that for all the attention paid to angry, politically radicalised young men, young women are at least as angry and radicalised, only they have veered very far to the left rather than the right. I won’t go into why I think this might be, except to say (with considerable foreboding) that living online and communicating largely through social media creates feedback loops that may amplify initially trivial differences into enormous ones.

But to return to my acquaintance’s question, surely it’s obvious that it cannot possibly be teenage girls and young women that drove all this stuff into legislatures and boardrooms — they just don’t have the institutional power. We’re not just talking about consumer tastes, we’re talking about laws, workplace policies and public spending. Even though young women have more power now than they have ever had in any previous society, and even though universities are engaged in a destructive feedback loop between female academics and their female students on courses mostly taken by young women, the constellation of far-left opinions on race, gender, the climate and Palestine my acquaintance was talking about has been in the ascendant since shortly after the turn of the century — much earlier than this radicalisation really got going.

The radicalisation of young women seems to me to have followed this institutional turn, not caused it. And that turn was driven not by young women but by some middle-aged men who went all in on it, and many more who got on the bandwagon because even if they thought it was all dumb they didn’t actually care one way or the other and it was the fashionable thing to do. Why that happened is another story. For now, my point is that it was not led by young women.

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I’m very sorry to have gone quiet in the past few weeks – I’ve been overwhelmed with clashing deadlines, a situation that should now ease since I’ve reduced my commitments (not to gender-critical campaigning). Perhaps the most consequential thing that happened while I was too busy to write about it was the decision by Girlguiding to require boys and men to leave the organisation by September. Having been one of the most disgraceful organisations to fall to trans inclusion, it is now, finally and painfully, dragging itself back out again.

This really should never have happened. And not just because it’s wrong and dangerous to include boys “as if” they were girls, and men “as if” they were women, but because Girlguiding is a charity with a Royal Charter that names its beneficiaries as girls. Only girls. Charities are given tax breaks because their charitable objects are recognised as for the public good, and people donate to them in order to pursue their objects. They simply aren’t free to spend money except on those objects, and on their stated beneficiaries. Sometimes that may mean spending money on other people – for example if you’re a charity for children you might put on events for parents – but you do this because you genuinely think this benefits the group you exist to serve. Admitting boys and pretending that they are girls obviously harms girls rather than benefitting them. Doing it was always, to put it bluntly, a type of theft, both from taxpayers and from donors.

Of course Girlguiding denied that this is what it was doing by playing the usual wordgames – insisting that “trans girls are girls”. But whatever about material reality, this was simply never true legally. The UK has never had gender self-ID. The only people who even arguably count as members of the opposite sex for any legal purpose are those with gender-recognition certificates, who must be over 18. The Charity Commission should have stepped in immediately to stop this. But that would mean admitting it had been wrong all along.

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Last weekend I spoke at a conference focused on the Irish Gender Recognition Act in Dublin. Much of what I said will seem familiar to people who follow my work, but I think I managed to express why gender self-ID is harmful to women rather than men better than I have before.

I think the most useful thing I can do today is to lay out what I see as the “TERF Island playbook”: whatever the specifics of a country’s laws, the fightback has the same steps, broadly speaking, and it’s worth thinking about it at that high level as well as in granular detail.

One way you can think of legal gender recognition is as part of a broader cultural shift that goes back centuries, that started as something that started good but overshot, and that’s individualism/ liberalism. If you think about the conservative-liberal spectrum, for conservatives, there is a shared human nature, and the point of society is to try to give life to shared ideals, which will inevitably involve societal impositions and restraints on individuals. For liberals, being a good, happy and flourishing individual is primarily about the freedom to make our own decisions and to choose for ourselves what it means to live the “good life”.

A so-called liberal democracy is an attempt to combine and balance the two ideals, which both have a lot to offer, within the human-rights framework, which is based on a shared understanding of what it is to flourish as a human, but many of those rights are to make our own choices and express ourselves as we wish. It’s built into the system that rights sometimes collide, and are often constrained by the compromises required to share a society with others. To quote the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”

But what’s happening now is that we’ve pushed out past the liberal side of this balance to a new extreme: to the position that each person has a true self that they get to choose or discover by introspection, and gets to tell the world who they are. There is no role then for other people to say anything other than “I affirm you.” People are who they say they are.

This new belief system means abandoning the healthy individualism of classical liberalism, which involves respect for differences of opinion and emphasis on “freedom rights”. Within it, notions of a shared human nature and the common good are no longer regarded as normative or aspirational but instead as coercive. It prioritises freedom to do as thou wilt. It’s freedom for the strong, not the weak; freedom to impose, not freedom from being imposed upon. It’s all about the swinging fist, with no concern for where the nose begins.

And that’s why it’s women who suffer when you say that “man” and “woman” are opt-in categories. It’s just fact – unwelcome fact, but fact nonetheless – that women are physically weaker, that we’re the rapeable sex, that we bear nearly the entire burden of reproduction, that we commit few violent crimes and almost no sexual ones, and are victimised far more often than we victimise. We need “freedoms from” more than men do, and men enjoy “freedoms to” more than we do. Freedom for women means constraints on men.

So self-ID is a men’s rights movement. Not a movement for genuine “men’s rights” – things that are actually due to men and that most men are interested in, to be clear – most men don’t want to destroy women’s spaces and services and sports. Nonetheless the only people who benefit are men, and other men pretty much are unaffected.

It’s women, not men, who lose out by allowing people to define their own sex for the purpose of single-sex spaces, services and sports.* I do acknowledge that men have privacy rights too, and most men don’t actually want women who identify as men in their spaces – but not that many women who identify as men are actually deluded enough to use men’s spaces, and the few that do are at least not a threat. The other way round the calculus is completely different. This is a movement that takes away from women and gives to men.

There’s a whole interesting thing about why it is that it’s women who are more likely to tell pollsters that they’re supportive of this. But I’ve no time for that today – have another conference next year and invite me back and I’ll talk about why No, this Isn’t All The Fault of Women, Specifically Feminists. But it’s not nothing to do with women either.

Well, this new way of thinking about things is making a lot of headway, but it’s by no means hegemonic, and everywhere it arises, some pre-existing norms and rules and structures survive. To the extent that we can use and ideally strengthen those pre-existing norms and rules and structures, we can contain the harms and then hopefully squeeze the space left for them more and more until the new ideology returns to being marginal.

And that in a nutshell is the “TERF Island” playbook. It starts with shoring up laws protecting freedom of speech and belief, in particular in the workplace. If people can’t say that there are two sexes and that sex can’t change while holding down a job, then they won’t say it. The most powerful silencing force is the fear of being indigent. Hardly anyone will speak up if they risk not being able to pay their mortgage or put food on the table.

I’m not sure that Maya Forstater, the CEO of Sex Matters – my and Fiona McAnena’s colleague – understood her employment-tribunal case against her employer, the Center for Global Development, in this light at the time, but with hindsight it was the first stage in this playbook. Maya lost her job because in 2018 she said publicly that she opposed the UK government’s plans to introduce legal gender self-ID – to make it cheap and easy to change your recorded sex on demand. It took her four years, and a harrowing loss at first instance, before she won on appeal; established the precedent that so-called “gender-critical belief” was sufficiently respectable that being fired for holding and expressing it was a breach of UK employment law; and received compensation for her employer’s unlawful discrimination against her.

So what was Maya’s dangerous belief? It had three parts: (1) that sex is real, binary and immutable; (2) that being able to say so is important; and (3) that this is especially so for women’s rights. It’s extraordinary to think that almost exactly five years ago, a UK judge ruled that this mainstream position was so beyond the pale that someone who stated it could be cast out of polite society, stripped of the protection of the law and left unable to make a living.

Since then a series of legal victories citing that precedent have firmly established that, in the UK, it is possible to speak the truth about the two sexes and keep your job. Of course, not all employers have yet got the message, but it is spreading.

Now the next step is under way: using this freedom not merely to state abstract truths about the two sexes, but to advocate for sex-based rights in the workplace and elsewhere. Because free speech isn’t “just” speech – it’s advocacy. Women don’t merely want to be able to accurately refer to people’s sex, and to say that sex matters, we need to speak honestly about sex because our rights depend on doing so. In this sense, gender-critical speech is advocacy for sex-based rights. A series of cases in the past year, including one taken by Nurse Sandie Peggie against the hospital where she works in Scotland and another by a group of nurses working in Darlington, have involved female employees who don’t merely want to say they think men can’t be women in general, but to say that a specific man isn’t a woman, and that therefore he should get out of their changing rooms.

These cases were already under way when, in April last year, the UK Supreme Court ruled in the case of For Women Scotland (FWS) that the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act really means sex – male and female – not “sex as modified by a gender-recognition certificate” and certainly not self-identified gender. The Equality Act is a consolidation act that replaced most pre-existing equality and anti-discrimination law as well as adding some new elements. The judgment used the principles of statutory interpretation and an examination of the purpose of the Equality Act – namely to tackle longstanding, entrenched discrimination based on objective characteristics – and came to the conclusion that the law simply couldn’t function any other way.

The judgment didn’t expressly say this, but what it was doing was reasserting the importance in law and everyday life of the material reality of sex. It was based on recognising that women experience sex discrimination because of their sex, not because of how they identify. The brute fact of being female – of belonging to the sex capable of getting pregnant, even if you as a particular woman don’t ever get pregnant, or indeed can’t personally get pregnant – is why women have been exploited and oppressed throughout recorded history.

What the FWS ruling did is put the notion of gender identity, of transition, back in its box. People can think of themselves as trans and “identify” as the opposite sex if they want – that’s freedom of belief and speech – but doing so is not going to change the category they are in for the purposes of anti-discrimination law. And since the legal underpinning for female-only and male-only spaces, services and sports is precisely that anti-discrimination law, the ruling means that identifying as trans makes no difference to the category an individual belongs in for such purposes.

For decades pretty much everyone has been in agreement that you can “live as the opposite sex”, and that part of what that means is using opposite-sex spaces. But now the UK’s highest court has ruled that you simply don’t have the right to do that, not now, not ever. Not if you take hormones. Not if you have surgery. Not if you get a gender-recognition certificate. At the same time we have been taking and winning cases on freedom of speech and belief. We still need a really good case establishing that you don’t have to use preferred pronouns, but the direction of travel is clear. It’s not quite all over bar the crying, but that moment is getting closer.

So what would a gender clinic be able to offer once the crying is over too?

For adults, I think they could offer cross-sex hormones and extreme cosmetic surgery as a consumer product – that is, without any claims of alleviating medical symptoms, with full disclosure that nothing being offered will change a person’s legal or social status or give them any new rights or oblige anyone else to do anything, and with an honest description of the costs and risks. Needless to say, none of this would be paid for by taxpayers or insurers, and any doctor who offered would have sky-high malpractice insurance premiums.

And what about children? As far as I’m aware there is nowhere in the world where extreme cosmetic surgeries are provided to minors. But even before we get to a more general understanding that this is what the gender clinics are in truth offering, I think that taking the use of opposite-sex spaces, now or in the future, off the table deals a fatal blow to paediatric gender-affirming care.

Think about it: what precisely is the offer of gender clinics to children, as distinct to adults? It’s that you can be redirected to the other sex’s puberty and that if you start early you will pass better. The promise of the pathway that starts with childhood social transition and proceeds to puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones is that you’ll end up living in true stealth: indistinguishable from people of the sex you wish you were.

But the For Women Scotland judgment means that you won’t be able to use the spaces for that sex, at least not lawfully. Sure, there’s no such thing as toilet police and if you really do pass nobody will know. But crucially, if you’re never going to be entitled to be treated in everyday life as a member of the opposite sex, that’s simply not something clinicians can sell you. They can’t offer kids a treatment that is predicated on that child doing something the Supreme Court has said they have no right to do because if they did, that would infringe on other people’s rights.

Which takes me back to fists and noses. One person’s right to identify how they like ends where other people’s right to set their own boundaries begins. Some freedoms are “from” and some freedoms are “to”, and a man’s freedom to declare himself a woman isn’t compatible with a woman’s freedom from men going where they aren’t welcome.

*Typo fixed post-publication — this originally read “men, not women”, d’oh!

After the high of hearing that the puberty-blockers trial had been paused, it was a pretty depressing week. I had genuinely thought that Wes Streeting, the health secretary, had been responsible for the pause — when ministers work out that a policy is, in the words of Sir Humphrey, “courageous”, that viewpoint tends to percolate out through the system, even reaching independent regulators and even if they have been saying for weeks or months that it’s out of their hands. But it has emerged that the decision to pause the trial was down to a sole brave official in one of the relevant regulatory bodies, Professor Jacob George, the recently appointed chief medical and scientific officer of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who looked hard at the research design and ethics, asked the tough questions and suspended the trial, saying it would only be restarted if the research team at King’s College London could provide satisfactory answers.

George was outed as having been instrumental in the decision to pause by Cathy Newman of Channel 4 and Times Radio. Both she and Natasha Loder, health editor at The Economist, have said publicly that they received tipoffs to look at George’s tweets from before he worked at the MHRA, which revealed him to hold so-called “gender-critical” beliefs. Newman broke the news that the MHRA had recused him from any involvement in or oversight of the trial as a result, and Loder then published screen captures of four of his posts.

It’s hardly the first time transactivists have used the mainstream media or social media to surface vague allegations of “transphobia” or bias in the hope of bumping employers into hasty action. The most direct parallel is probably with the case of barrister Allison Bailey, who was sanctioned by her chambers, Garden Court, after anonymous Twitter users tweeted describing her as transphobic because she had been involved in the launch of LGB Alliance. Rather than follow its own procedures for dealing with such allegations Garden Court panicked — and ended up losing in a case brought by Bailey in the employment tribunal. By now employers should be wise to this sort of weaponisation of their disciplinary processes.

I’m too conflicted to write more about this entanglement of journalism and retribution for whistleblowing, since Loder is an ex-colleague. If you want to read more about it, Sex Matters wrote to the MHRA over the weekend, calling on the regulator to reverse its decision to recuse Professor George from the trial and setting out the timeline of the events. So instead the rest of this article will look at the arguments for and against the trial, some of which featured in the MHRA’s decision to pause it and some of which were aired on X in the days leading up to the recusal.

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This picture and another of Watson below used with permission; contact me if you want to ask the copyright-holder to use either

Regular readers will remember that in November 2023 I took part in a panel discussion at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Also on the panel was Freda Wallace, a trans-identifying man. Afterwards I tweeted a few times – in very restrained terms, considering Wallace’s grotesquely offensive behaviour – and thought no more about it.

But unbeknownst to me Lynsay Watson, a buddy of Wallace’s and a former cop who had been fired for gross misconduct, reported me for criminal harassment for those posts. I only found out that the police had recorded my name against a crime on the Police National Database as a result of that report when Watson applied for judicial review of my home police force’s refusal to actually prosecute me, and as an “interested party” I was provided with the papers (my writeup for the Critic last year is here).

This post picks up at that point, and runs to the end of a court hearing last Thursday, February 12th, in Manchester. Others have already spoken about what happened directly after that hearing. For now I won’t.

First, as expected, Watson’s initial application for judicial review was rejected “on the papers”, meaning without a hearing. Also as expected he appealed — as I discovered on February 5th, when my home police force’s solicitors wrote to tell me that in a week’s time there would be an in-person hearing in the Manchester Civil Justice Centre at which Watson would represent himself. I also received both Watson’s arguments and the police force’s response.

I know of many people who have been harassed online by Watson, at least half a dozen of whom have, like me, filed crime reports. Like mine, those crime reports went nowhere because the police hadn’t been able (to be honest, hadn’t tried very hard) to find him. They have arranged voluntary interviews with him by phone several times, but he never shows, and when they visit his most recent known address they are told he moved away some time ago.

It’s remarkable that with all the police’s resources and powers, Watson was eventually located only because of the diligence of private citizens. Our efforts were further complicated by there being no picture of him in circulation more recent than a couple of tabloid interviews around 20 years ago, which were probably pretty airbrushed even then. The police had been asked to issue a press release describing him as wanted for questioning, which could have included the picture on his warrant card, but refused.

So this was a priceless opportunity: a known place and time with Watson guaranteed to be present. I told some of the other people who have made crime reports against Watson, tipped off a couple of press photographers and bought a train ticket to Manchester. Meanwhile journalist Stuart Campbell, aka Wings Over Scotland, whose crime report against Watson had led to an arrest warrant, informed Greater Manchester Police.

On the day Dr Emma Hilton, the chair of Sex Matters, who is based in Manchester, and Cathy Larkman of Women’s Rights Network, a retired senior police officer, accompanied me to court. I was unwilling to attend alone — Watson has made serious threats against me and others and generally gives a strong impression of emotional dysregulation. Not knowing what he looked like made me even more worried — I was afraid that he might be in the vicinity of the court and I wouldn’t recognise him, whereas he would easily recognise me.

Outside court with Dr Emma Hilton and Cathy Larkman (picture credit: Iain Masterton)

The press photographers were already outside when we arrived, well before the hearing, and we went inside to wait after asking them to snap anyone they thought might be him. The picture at the top of this article was one of those “potentials”, taken well before the hearing started and sent directly to us by phone. When we entered the courtroom Watson was already sitting in there alone. He turned and gave the three of us a long stare as we sat down at the back, at which point we were able to be sure that the man in the picture was definitely him.

It was obviously interesting to see and hear the Mystery (trans-identifying) Man in the flesh. I would have had no idea if I had passed him in the street that he was a “trans woman”; he just looked like a man with a ponytail and a fringe. He’s lived in many parts of the UK, moving around from one police force to another, and I wouldn’t even have been able to guess what his accent might be. He turns out to speak with a soft but distinct Scottish burr (he was born in Scotland) and in a light, slightly whispery voice. I wonder whether he was deliberately speaking quietly, either to make it hard for those of us several rows back to hear what he was saying or to sound less masculine. But anyway, it was neither an obviously faked ladyvoice nor a booming baritone.

The hearing was listed to last 30 minutes — 10.30–11am — but ran almost until noon, when the following case in the same courtroom was scheduled to start. It was one of the most surreal and fascinating experiences of my life. I took notes during it, which are not a verbatim transcript (I’m a fast touch-typist, not a stenographer) but are a good-faith aide memoire.

The first half-hour or so covered nothing substantive. First the judge sought to confirm that the interested parties — me and Freda Wallace — had been informed of the hearing. One of the oddities of this case is that Watson, not my alleged “victim”, made the crime report, he said because Wallace is disabled and was too distressed by the whole thing to do it himself or to attend court. When the judge asked for information regarding the alleged disability, Watson said he wasn’t willing to say more.

Watson said he had told Wallace personally and that he had sent his papers to a Sex Matters email address, but couldn’t confirm that they had been passed to me. I nobly put up my hand and told the judge that I was the Helen Joyce in question and could confirm that I had indeed received the papers. That settled, the judge decided to accept Watson’s assurance that Wallace had received them too, and that he knew about the hearing but didn’t want to attend.

Next came the question of standing. Counsel for my home police force argued that Watson was not sufficiently associated with the incident to be able to take a judicial review of the charging decision.

Here are my notes on what he said:

There is a victim of alleged criminality – Wallace. There is a witness – Watson. There is an effort to assign ‘standing’ to another where there is no identified legal basis to do so.

Seems pretty clear to me. But I Am Not A Lawyer (neither, of course, is Watson).

Watson said… well, hard to tell really, I think that “transphobia” affects all trans people? Sorry, when I can’t follow someone’s ramblings I can’t make comprehensible notes.

Next came the question of whether what I did was sufficiently bad to have merited prosecution. Here are my notes of what the police counsel said about that (the three paragraphs are from different bits of the hearing):

It is a very high threshold. While the police accept the tweets could be of significant harm or offence to an individual, that is not the test to be applied. It’s not whether they are offensive, or even grossly offensive – it’s whether they constitute harassment. No court could conclude that those criminal offences are made out.

This is a case that is in effect doomed to fail.

This is a very challenging area for the police to attempt to police. Online discourse in this area is characterised frequently by deeply entrenched positions. Oftentimes the communications exchanged by the parties falls well below the standard of what would be hoped for in civil public discourse.

Again, I Am Not A Lawyer. Or a stenographer. But how bloody enraging is the characterisation of what I said as falling far below the level expected of civil public discourse! I think I showed quite remarkable restraint in not saying publicly what I really thought of Freda Wallace’s behaviour at the IEA event! I kept calm at this point by imagining jumping up like an actress in an unrealistic American courtroom drama and hollering something like “Oh PLEASE, you try sitting there calmly while a fat, drunk self-professed fetishist talks about his lesbian penis and penchant for fucking TERFs’ husbands!” (Staying silent was my second moment of extreme nobility, after informing the judge I had indeed been told about the hearing.)

Then it all got very unstructured. Somehow – I couldn’t follow – Watson circled back to the question of standing, arguing that he did have standing because (a) he had previously been given permission to take a judicial review against Greater Manchester Police’s decision not to prosecute Stuart Campbell for “misgendering” Brianna Ghey, a trans-identifying teenage boy who was murdered; (b) “arguably” he had less standing in that case than he did in this one — I think because of his close connection with Freda Wallace — and therefore since he had been given permission in that one he should be given permission in this one (in fact he shouldn’t have been given permission in the first one either); and (c) he had told my home police force “repeatedly” that he had authority to act on Wallace’s behalf and they “wouldn’t even engage with me to say ‘prove it’. This gave me a personal interest in the decision-making process.”

The question of whether he had standing seemed, in his mind, to be the same question as whether the police should have prosecuted me. He had managed to grasp that it would be “exceptional” for the judge to overrule a police force on a decision not to prosecute – but in his opinion this was precisely such an “exceptional” situation because of what he described as the systemic refusal of the entire police service to investigate online crimes against trans people.

A different judge (Judge Bird, who has been handling Watson’s ongoing attempts to get Stuart Campbell prosecuted) had, he claimed, previously told him that it would be “very serious” if the police service was maintaining a secret policy of not investigating reports of online crimes against trans people. He said Bird had encouraged him to go away and find evidence to support this allegation, which he said he had done. He had applied for “a number” of judicial reviews related to this national conspiracy, and had made approximately 25 or 40 crime reports — he gave both figures at different points during the hearing — to forces all over the country, which had all brushed them off, saying that they were “not interested” and that what had happened was “not a crime”.

At one point Watson spent about 15 minutes complaining that he had applied to see a letter that I and five others who have alleged harassment by him had written to the chief constables of the relevant police forces, urging them to cooperate and investigate him properly. Watson had previously demanded disclosure of this letter, and been refused. On Thursday the judge tried again and again to say that this refusal had already been upheld, and Watson had not made any renewed application relating to it and that therefore it was not relevant to this hearing. Counsel for my home force chipped in to say that the letter concerned matters under live police investigation and that it had been mentioned in the force’s original arguments against the judicial review only to illustrate that Watson’s application had not been made “in a vacuum”.

In response Watson contradicted the judge repeatedly, on occasion talking over her, and said that because the judge who had rejected the initial application for judicial review had seen the letter while he had not, he could not trust that the judge had not been biased by it. I assure you, said the judge in this hearing, that judges are well used to deciding cases on the relevant material, and the letter had been judged not relevant. But on and on he went.

The other bit of what theatre folk call “business” was when Watson suddenly said that there were police officers outside the courtroom and that he feared they were there in order to arrest him once the hearing was over. He made mention at this point of the “people” sitting at the back of the courtroom, that is, Emma, Cathy and me. (There were indeed police waiting outside; we saw them before we went in.) This, he claimed, was a breach of his Article 3 rights. Article 3 is about torture, inhumane or degrading treatment, and this is such an overreach that I can’t help wondering whether he meant Article 6, the right to a fair trial — not that being arrested for unrelated charges after a court hearing is a breach of Article 6, but it’s at least in the same ballpark. Ish.

The judge said that whether or not there were police outside, and whether or not he was arrested afterwards, was all irrelevant to this hearing (she must have been getting tired of these words by this point). The whole way through she kept trying, without much success, to get Watson to focus on the case at hand and to stop extemporising about secret police policies, undisclosed letters and other judicial-review applications and crime reports. It was pretty funny to watch, until you remember that all this was costing public money: a judge, court officials, a solicitor and counsel for my home force’s chief constable all in attendance, not to mention court time and all the preparation for this farce.

Anyway. What I took away from it all was this. First, Watson is truly convinced that “deadnaming” and “misgendering” are such serious acts that they automatically constitute criminal harassment. Second, he thinks that means any trans person has standing to complain about deadnaming or misgendering whenever it occurs and whoever is the “victim”. Third, he concludes that any police force who receives such a complaint but doesn’t proceed to prosecution is motivated by a prejudiced and unlawful determination to leave trans people entirely without police protection. (Hypothetically, I presume he also believes that, fourth, any court that tries such an allegation and doesn’t convict would be similarly motivated.)

I can see — sort of — that given this (false) starting premise, the rest (kind of) follows. And I can also see why legalistic arguments that separate out questions of standing, decision-making concerning prosecution and indeed anything else would then be beside the point. The way Watson sees it, the only relevant facts are that I, Helen Joyce, called Freda Wallace “Fred” and “he/him” and this was reported by someone, anyone, to the police: case closed.

Of course, the starting premise is false. But the substantive part of the hearing largely consisted of Watson insisting that it was true. Here’s a selection of the things he said (not direct quotes, but very close):

The impugned tweets were particularly grossly offensive in nature.

The oppressive nature of repeatedly deadnaming — I’ve been trying to get police forces to see this for around five years now.

With this issue of deadnaming and repeated misgendering we are often reaching a point where it can become so oppressive that the act itself becomes grossly offensive.

Misgendering, deadnaming — it’s worse than when they used to out gay footballers in the 70s and 80s, same kind of thing. They really didn’t care, you could read about it in the Sunday Sport, another person’s life destroyed. Now it seems repugnant and offensive.

It’s a national sport for certain people to deadname.

Ms Wallace cannot even go online without being abused by her dead name.

It all goes back to certain persons with a very high profile doing this to her.

The harms caused by deadnaming trans people are huge. You out people to friends and family who simply don’t know, to colleagues. You cause immense problems with their gender dysphoria, it’s a reminder of previous identities.

The defence barrister used words like “not even close to the threshold” — I started to shake because I find that so offensive — the idea of repeatedly misgendering on a public forum, it’s there forever — outing trans people, deadnaming her — as something that can be brushed off… you destroy lives, destroy mental health, destroy trans people who had been comfortable in their new social circle.

I’ve been trying now to get various courts to hear from trans people how we regard deadnaming — for some accidental reason, that’s one thing — but repeated deadnaming to dehumanise and harass people… there’s no challenge for police to investigate, the challenge is to find an excuse not to.

The cruellest thing is to deadname and out and humiliate by making sure [trans people] never ever have a private life.

I know from my community that most trans people have totally abandoned the digital space.

This is what has happened to trans people, friends, colleagues, it’s horrific. Free speech — I’m a great believer in free speech — but this isn’t free speech… There’s no article protection for harassing another — deadnaming is targeted harassment. There’s no public interest, just pure harassment.

(My third moment of nobility during the trial was refraining from audibly scoffing at Watson’s claim to be a “great believer in free speech”.)

Watson claimed that because of his own former name being in the public domain, he had had to go on medication for stress and depression. (Side note: the person I allegedly deadnamed was Wallace, not Watson, so whether Watson finds being deadnamed upsetting is irrelevant to whether I committed a crime. And I say allegedly because I call Wallace “Fred” only because it’s the masculine version of Freda, not because it’s his “deadname”. I don’t know and don’t care what he was called before he started claiming to be a woman.)

Watson also claimed several times that I had made demeaning and sexualised remarks about Wallace — from my notes, remarks of an “overtly sexual nature”, “crude and repugnant sexual allegations”, “aggravated sexual slurs” and “sexual innuendos”. In fact I did nothing that could possibly be described that way by anyone with even a passing acquaintance with reality.

One possibility is that Watson is thinking of things that Wallace, not I, said. During the event — which was recorded and is still available to watch on YouTube — Wallace bragged of having sex with lesbians as a “sperm-producing female” and fucking men with his “female penis in fetish clubs”. He claimed the husbands of women who campaign for single-sex spaces might support their wives in public, but “in private they fuck me”.

The other, perhaps more likely, possibility is that Watson took exception to my clearing up online speculation about the visible lump of upper-thigh fat hanging out of Wallace’s ripped fishnets, which many people who saw a photo of it thought might be a stray testicle (see below; mind your eyes). I tweeted to put them right so that this inaccuracy didn’t gain the status of established fact – but this wasn’t me making any sort of sexualised remark! It was the opposite; I was clearing up a sexualised misconception! (A fourth moment of nobility; they’re really racking up.) Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.

This wasn’t the only fantastical element of Watson’s complaint: he genuinely seemed also to think that my referring to Wallace as a man was intruding on his privacy by “outing” him. This is absurd: Wallace talks about being trans all the time and was invited to join the panel at IEA specifically because he’s trans. More fundamentally, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes or ears that he’s a man — as it is for Watson himself. Here’s another photo of him from Thursday before the hearing.

(And yet Watson is perhaps owed a scintilla of sympathy for holding the delusion that trans people must be referred to by their chosen pronouns and name. Both Wallace and he were referred to as women, Miss and she/her throughout Thursday’s hearing, and rainbow-washed police forces often speak and act like this is compulsory. I can kind of see why Watson might think the police and courts should jump to it when people like me don’t comply.)

Overall, I came away understanding that Watson regards himself as a one-“woman” crusader for men’s right to be seen as and referred to as women if that is what they wish, with refusal punished as a crime. The reason he’s constantly reporting people for “misgendering and deadnaming” and trying to judicially review forces that do not prosecute is that he regards it as his job to educate police forces and courts on what he regards as their legal responsibilities.

Police have had long enough to get to know this issue, he said at one point: they know “full well” that repeated misgendering and deadnaming are “permanent public outing of trans people”. Close to the end of the hearing he said, bathetically: “I’m looking for one court in this land to acknowledge this.”

On the train home from Manchester that afternoon, I received a call from my home police force asking whether the harassment I had reported had continued past the last date in my statement. The officer didn’t say why, but harassment “times out” after six months, meaning that if someone hasn’t been charged within six months they never will be. I was able to report that it was ongoing, and to send the officer who called screenshots of further social-media posts that continued the long-running pattern. This means my crime report about Watson is still live, and that Watson can still be prosecuted.

Judgment on whether Watson will get permission to judicially review my home police was reserved (meaning it wasn’t handed down straight away). The judge gave no indication of how long it would take.

A reader drew my attention to this interesting judgment, which was handed down before Christmas. It concerns a trans-identifying woman with a gender-recognition certificate (FZ), who is married to a woman (MZ) who has had two children with donor sperm since the couple got together. The first child was born before they married and the second after. The couple regard FZ as the children’s father and argued that she should be registered as such on the second child’s birth certificate.

I’m not going to go through the judgment offering legal commentary — I’m not qualified. What interests me is the way the case brings two sociolegal fictions, one time-honoured and the other recent, into a fascinating collision.

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A vivid example was provided last Friday when a young woman went into the toilet at the Hippodrome casino in central London and saw two cross-dressing men inside. She left, asked a security guard to remove them and were told that they had the right to use the toilets because they were “dressed as women”. So she gathered some friends and they returned and challenged the men themselves.

Much of the altercation was videoed; security turned up and in the end the men left voluntarily. There’s a writeup in the Daily Mail, and one of the women involved talked about it to GB News. (As it happens, I was at the same event as the young women (the Hippodrome lets out private rooms), but I had left before it all kicked off. )

I’ve spent some time in the past couple of days looking at hostile responses on social media. Most posters sympathise with them and think they did a great job of standing up for themselves — as do I. But I always wonder how these things come across to people who either disagree with my position or aren’t sure what to think.

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jealous, faithless

ramblings of a gen z heretic

By Serena Worley

Here’s the quote:

“It is hard to remember that there are cases that we never hear about (largely because we never hear about them), but it is important to remember that this social phenomenon has had far more victims than we can ever know.”

The reason that it resonated with me is the double consciousness experienced by all of us who stick our heads above the parapet on this topic. Publicly, it seems like there are very few victims of gender-related cancel culture — very few stories of ostracism, sacking and the like caused by refusal to play along. But privately we hear from these victims all the time. Most don’t share their stories openly, whether because they are too embarrassed or traumatised, because they fear even worse happening if they do or because they think going public will cause them problems in their future lives.

This disconnect between private and public knowledge is unsettling, and one of the reasons for making these stories public is to help reconcile the two. So in that spirit, I’m sharing another such story, less dramatic perhaps but at least as shocking, in that it involved the full might of an institution deployed in an attempt to destroy a young woman’s life. Thankfully, she was able to fight back and come out relatively unscathed, but in such cases the process is the punishment.

I met the young woman in question a while back, when she came up to talk to me after an event at which I spoke. Some time later she emailed to say that her university had just notified her that she was being investigated for having breached several of its policies, including those governing student misconduct and equal opportunity. She wanted to know if I would write a letter in support of her that she could add to her written response, which I did. (So did several other campaigners against gender ideology and for women’s rights.)

Her crime? Writing a rebuttal to an article in a student magazine about how TERFs are not just wrong but bigoted. The magazine had published her response, someone had complained and now she was required to provide a written response to the allegations and then attend a misconduct hearing. If the allegations were upheld she risked expulsion.

Fortunately, she is an intelligent and articulate young woman with a strong support system. She was able to write a compelling rebuttal of the accusations and express herself convincingly in the hearing, with the result that the accusations were dismissed in their entirety.

But that best-case outcome is still shocking. A student who did nothing but respond to a (badly argued and written) article in a student publication was put through a terrifying ordeal that can, without exaggeration, be compared to being charged with a crime of which she was totally innocent, on the basis of an anonymous accusation. Okay, she wasn’t going to end up with a criminal record or in jail – but being expelled from university is a serious penalty for a young person, with potentially life-changing consequences. And the fear and emotional strain she was put through will take quite some time to recover from.

Some of the victims aren’t as well-placed as “Anna” (not her real name) to defend themselves. They either end up sanctioned or – and this is probably more likely – apologise, retract and go dark. Even those who, like her, succeed in rebutting the allegations rarely want to talk about what happened publicly for fear that doing so will tarnish their reputation and complicate future job-hunting. As Serena says in her post, this sort of thing is happening all over the place. But we rarely get to hear about it.

With this young woman’s permission, I’m sharing my letter of support, with her name changed and a few minor details redacted.

I met Anna at an event at which I was speaking on the enormously important topic of the medicalisation of childhood gender distress. She impressed me as a compassionate, thoughtful and brave young woman whose own experience of gender distress and mental-health struggles had given her a wisdom and insight rare in someone so young, and a determination to use that painful experience to help other young women struggling to find their way in our rapidly changing society that would be rare at any age.

As Anna told me when we talked, her worldview has been shaped by her struggles to accept the unalterable fact of her femaleness while rejecting the stereotypes associated with her sex. This is a task that complicates adolescence for many intelligent, sensitive, non-conforming young women, not least because our society puts extra obstacles in their way while they try to do so.

During the 20th century women’s status in many countries, including my home country of Ireland, improved beyond all recognition. Women gained the right to vote, own property, gain a full education, join the professions, leave unhappy marriages and control their own fertility.

But no sooner had we achieved substantive equality under the law than a new — and I would argue extremely harmful — ideology emerged. It overturned the progressive and liberatory message that being female was a neutral but unchangeable aspect of human biology, and that nowadays girls and women can do anything because we have finally recognised that the norms and strictures imposed on the female sex were discriminatory, harmful and senseless. In its place it reified those norms and strictures by turning them into the definition of what it is to be a girl or woman. A girl or woman is now a human being who “identifies with” feminine stereotypes; a person born female who finds those stereotypes unappealing is invited to identify out of her sex. If she declines to do so, she is assumed to “identify” with, or as, the sort of person who fits those stereotypes.

This novel and regressive world view is the opposite of progressive and liberatory! It is harmful for any adolescent, but most especially an adolescent like Anna, who not only wanted, naturally enough, to grow up to be a full, rounded human being but also had to negotiate the emergence of same-sex sexual orientation. I also have a gay child — a son who is now a young adult — and I am well aware of how, even with the most supportive parents and friends, teenagers who are realising that in this respect they are unlike their friends pick up homophobic messages from the society around them, even if they are not overt in the way they were when I was a teenager in the 1980s. I am full of admiration for the young gay adults who navigate this extra complication in their teens and come out stronger, kinder and more insightful, as both my son and Anna and her girlfriend did.

I have read both the original article to which Anna was responding, and Anna’s own article. The first is intellectually superficial: full of unevidenced smears by association, circular reasoning and question-begging. It would require not one but several articles to fully debunk it. However I fully support the author’s right to write it. Young people deserve grace as they are learning and navigating conflicting theories and visions of the world.

Anna’s article, by contrast, is logically coherent and supplies the evidence for all its claims. Her compassion and joyful vision of a world in which all humans, both male and female, can be free to flourish without the impositions of traditional notions of masculinity and femininity shines through in every word. It is clearly the product of profound thinking as well as painful but ultimately transformative personal experience.

In other words, I am not merely defending Anna’s article on the grounds of free speech and academic freedom. I am defending it as precisely the sort of brave, rigorous and insightful evidenced engagement with big, scary and important subjects that all of us, but most especially academics, should be actively fostering in our youth.

I’m proud to know Anna. Her university should be proud that she is among its student body and, once she graduates, proud to have her among its alumni.

In this post I’m going to pick two particularly terrible aspects, and add some reflections on both judgments and what I think may and what I think (hope) may follow once appeals have been heard and all of this has shaken out.

Maria Kelly (Photo credit: Iain Masterton. Used with permission)

The maddest thing in Kelly (I think, at least, and against stiff competition) is that the judgment flatly rejects Kelly’s claim that she doesn’t see trans-identifying men as women. Here’s what it says:

“The claimant is aware that trans women believe their gender identity is at variance to their sex whereas non-trans men (including transvestites) do not.

“The claimant is aware that trans women often undergo a process for the purpose of reassigning their gender identity (or their belief in it) which may entail medical advice, hormonal treatment, and/or endeavouring to live permanently as a female including modifying their appearance and presentation. The claimant is aware that a transvestite i.e. crossdresser does not undergo such a process and is merely engaged in a temporary modification of their appearance.

“It is not therefore accepted that the claimant believes that trans women are indistinguishable from men in practice.”

Reading this, I boggle. It’s as if the tribunal had told an atheist that whatever she claimed, she really did believe that Christ died for our sins and rose again. And if I understand correctly, this is a finding of fact! If that’s right Kelly’s counsel will either have to argue in her appeal that this finding is so perverse it has to be overturned (it certainly seems so to me, though I am not a lawyer) or start her appeal from the position that she really does accept that “trans women” are a distinct group of male people whom she does in fact distinguish from other men.

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In this post I’ll focus on the Peggie judgment, and return to the Kelly one in the next.

Sandie Peggie with her solicitor, Margaret Gribbon (photo credit: Nicole Jones)

Surely the most extraordinary thing about it was that it contained at least three direct quotes purporting to be from precedent-setting legal cases that were either misquoted or entirely made up. One purported to be from my colleague Maya Forstater’s appeal:

In Forstater v CDG Europe and others UKEAT/0105/20 the Employment Appeal Tribunal had emphasised that:

“It is important to bear in mind that the [Equality Act 2010] does not create a hierarchy of protected characteristics.”

Maya knows her ruling inside-out (she has an extraordinary memory for laws and judgments and can quote chunks verbatim), and as soon as she read this she was certain it didn’t feature. And sure enough, it’s pure invention. The tribunal has issued a correction – but one that raises more questions than it answers.

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If you haven’t already seen it — and if your blood pressure can take it — it’s here.

I had wondered whether Webberley could possibly believe the nonsense she talks — whether, in other words, she is deluded, stupid or saying things she knows not to be true. What I have concluded after the event (an hour of my life I won’t get back) is that none of these properly describe her. What she is is a bullshitter, in the sense proposed by American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his book “On Bullshit”, published in 2005.

What distinguishes liars from bullshitters, Frankfurt said, was that liars knowingly seek to convince others of a falsehood, whereas bullshitters don’t care and may not even know whether what they say is true or false. The bullshitter’s speech is more profoundly instrumental — and cynical — than the speech of the liar, who seeks to convince you of the truth of a falsehood. That speech isn’t intended to have any relationship with the truth, either positive or negative. Facts are neither here nor there.

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It’s a few months since a PR for Helen Webberley got in touch to say that she would like to do an event with me. If you have had the immense good fortune not to have come across Webberley before, she’s the founder of an online puberty-blockers and hormones mill called GenderGP; she and her husband faced fitness-to-practice hearings after other, less extreme gender clinicians complained about their slapdash and extreme prescribing practices; he lost his licence to practise; she kept hers upon appeal but has since let it lapse. Now GenderGP, which is based in Singapore but blocked by its government from prescribing to locals, offers online consultations and other services like voice training, and arranges for others to fill those prescriptions. I won’t say more here about what I think about this business model, but may return to it down the line.

I honestly thought the PR contact was a setup: that the assumption was that I would refuse and Webberley could then crow that for all that I insisted on the importance of free speech and open debate, when given the chance to go head to head with someone who disagreed with me, I backed down. Instead conversations about where and when continued. After a few delays it’s ended up happening this evening.

Times Radio were keen to host it, and it’s being broadcast live. The show will run for an hour, hosted by Jo Coburn, including intro and ad break. You can watch live on the Times Radio YouTube channel.

It seems that Webberley is doing the publicity rounds, presumably because she has just announced that GenderGP is now active in America. A debate with Julie Bindel on a podcast called the Hodge-Cast was recorded last weekend; it’s airing this evening at 6pm UK time on the show’s YouTube channel (the timing is a coincidence — neither the host nor Julie knew about my interview having been booked to go live that evening). Webberley also went on GB News, interviewed by Ben Leo — the interview has rightly gone viral after an impressive performance by Ben. His parting description of Webberley as “borderline evil” is all the more effective for being understated.

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